Search And Seizure

Investigators served a search warrant Monday night on the Lakewood home of Bruce Koklich, who faces a second trial next month on charges that he murdered his wife, the daughter of the late state Sen. Paul Carpenter. Koklich, 44, who is free on $1-million bail, allowed sheriff's homicide and crime-scene investigators inside the home on Fairway Drive, Lt. Ray Peavy said. They planned to look for potential evidence in the case, Peavy said, but he did not specify what.

This week it was announced that DNA testing of bones found buried beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England, had established that they belonged to King Richard III, who was killed in battle in 1485. Researchers were able to match DNA recovered from the skeleton with that of a living descendant of the much-vilified monarch's sister. The find was just the latest reminder of the immense power of DNA evidence, power that is expanding history and criminal justice but that also is subject to misuse.

A person stopped on the street by police, questioned and ordered to produce identification has not been seized but is merely engaged in a "consensual encounter," according to an Orange County ruling left standing Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court dismissed without comment or dissent an appeal of a ruling by a state Court of Appeal in Orange County upholding the October, 1986, arrest for cocaine possession of Servando Lopez on a Santa Ana street.

A Los Angeles ordinance that requires hotel owners to keep guest registries and permit police to inspect them without a search warrant does not violate the constitutional rights of the owners, a divided federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. A panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2 to 1 against a motel owner whose guest registries had been searched by Los Angeles police without consent. Judge Richard R. Clifton, writing for the majority, said hotel guests have no legal right to expect registries will be kept private, and the owners failed to prove the searches violated their 4th Amendment protections from unreasonable searches.

A federal judge in San Francisco struck down the Reagan Administration's plan for a random drug-testing program for the nation's 3,800 National Weather Service meteorologists. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Schnacke said the testing plan was overly broad and violated the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.

The U.S. Customs Service cannot impose drug tests on its 9,000 employees while the issue is being appealed, a federal appeals court ruled. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a government request to block a lower court order banning drug tests of customs workers pending the appeal. The appeals court will hear arguments in the case the week of Feb. 2, a court spokesman said. Customs is appealing a Nov.

A divided Florida Supreme Court declared random drug searches of commercial buses unconstitutional, saying the practice invited comparisons to Nazi Germany and communist countries. The court, in a 4-3 decision that overturned six drug convictions, said the practice violated state and federal constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure, even though the goal--stopping the flow of illegal drugs--was admirable.

Miami-Dade County has sued the state, contending it violated the U.S. Constitution when it cut down healthy trees believed to be exposed to citrus canker. The suit, filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, said that Florida violated the 4th Amendment's search and seizure rules by letting workers enter yards and take the trees without a warrant. The suit cited a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case that barred building inspectors from checking fire code violations without a warrant.

Ruling that a Santa Ana couple had a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their back yard, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided Thursday that police conducted an improper search and seizure of two automobiles that they owned. The judges, sitting in Pasadena, ruled 2 to 1 that the city violated 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure because it did not obtain warrants to search the property. Dale and Linda Conner were awarded $71,000 in damages.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court on Friday challenging the constitutionality of an anti-crime program that allows police to stop anyone on the street for questioning. Police have saturated five neighborhoods since Operation Active Criminal Eviction started, making 235 felony arrests and seizing 278 doses of crack cocaine, officials say. A record 101 homicides have been reported in the city this year.

Law enforcement officers may take a DNA sample from anyone arrested on a felony charge without running afoul of the suspect's right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, a divided federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The challenge brought by a group of Californians arrested for alleged felonies but never convicted upheld a 2004 amendment to the state's laws governing DNA collection and use. In a 2-1 ruling, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals compared taking an oral swab from a suspect with fingerprinting arrestees, a decades-old booking practice consistently upheld by the courts as a legitimate identification aid. "We assess the constitutionality of the 2004 amendment by considering the 'totality of the circumstances,' balancing the arrestees' privacy interests against the government's need for the DNA samples," said the opinion written by Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. "DNA analysis is an extraordinarily effective tool for law enforcement officials to identify arrestees, solve past crimes, and exonerate innocent suspects," wrote Smith, who was named to the court by President George W. Bush, in an opinion joined by a visiting Tennessee judge appointed by President Reagan.

The new U.S. military commander in Afghanistan will limit the use of airstrikes in order to help cut down on civilian casualties, his chief spokesman said Monday. In a "tactical directive" to be issued in coming days, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has ordered new operational standards, including refraining from firing on structures where insurgents may have taken refuge among civilians unless Western or allied troops are in imminent danger, said spokesman Navy Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith.

The U.S. Supreme Court has again undermined the only realistic protection against illegal searches and seizures: the ban on using tainted evidence at trial. The 5-4 decision in an Alabama case is doubly ominous for California, where misguided ballot initiatives have forbidden state courts from adopting stricter standards for the use of illegal evidence than federal courts require. The justices upheld drug and gun charges against Bennie D.

Mexican police searching for drug gangs seized a cache of automatic weapons and grenade launchers at a luxury apartment in the Caribbean resort of Cancun, near hotels full of foreign tourists. Tipped off by an informant, police found 22 guns, 14 grenades and about 500 rounds of ammunition at an exclusive beachside golf course development, a spokesman said. They also found police hats and car stickers with official police insignia.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to rule on whether police officers are free to search a parked vehicle whenever they arrest a driver or a passenger. Prosecutors, including Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, asked the high court to set "a clear, bright-line rule" that permits officers to search a vehicle whenever an arrest is made, even if the handcuffed person has been taken away.

Local police were relieved of duty Tuesday in the border cities of Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros and Reynosa as army troops disarmed the officers and searched for evidence that might link them to drug traffickers. In Nuevo Laredo, soldiers surrounded police headquarters at 8 a.m. and ordered officers to remain inside. Federal troops conducted a similar operation in Tijuana last January, at the beginning of an offensive against Mexico's drug cartels and their allies in the police.

A federal judge in Miami demanded that prosecutors in Manuel A. Noriega's drug case justify their seizure of all his assets, saying failure to do so violates the deposed Panamanian leader's constitutional rights. U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler rejected the government's claim that the seizures, which involved treaties with third countries, were not subject to judicial review.

Passengers in cars that are stopped by the police are "seized," the U.S. Supreme Court said Monday, and therefore have a right to contest the legality of the stop if they are searched and arrested. The 9-0 ruling clarifies the law on traffic stops, and it overturns the view of the California Supreme Court.

Attorneys for Anthony Pellicano are mounting a new legal attack to strip the prosecution of its most potent evidence, contending that an FBI agent concealed information and then lied about it to convince a judge to let him search the Hollywood private eye's office. That search five years ago, the government said, turned up thousands of hours of tapes of celebrities and attorneys -- the basis for wiretapping and racketeering charges against Pellicano and a dozen others.